To all philhellenes, anti-militarists, tyrant-haters, lovers of poetry, and dislikers of prose; to all who feel a distaste for politics, and especially the politics of the Roman Republic in its declining years; to all who in their youth wrestled with those famous (or infamous?) Commentaries until the iron entered their souls; to all, in short, whose interest in Julius Caesar is less than enthusiastic, we would offer an apology—and a consolation. An apology, because this number of Greece & Rome is largely concerned with their bête noire: this year is the 2,000th anniversary of Caesar's death, and it seemed a fitting occasion for attempting to take stock of a man who, for good or ill, had so great an impact on the Roman world. And a consolation, simply because it is a Caesarian millenary that we commemorate in this number: they can rest assured that we shall not do it again.

A Number of statues representing early national heroes, and presumably quite imaginary as portraits, were, according to the ancient sources, erected in Rome before the second century b.c. But our earliest reference to honorific portraits of contemporary, or near-contemporary, public persons relates to the year 158 b.c., when an order was issued, so the elder Pliny informs us, for the removal from the Forum of all statues of magistrates which had not been officially authorized— populi out senatus sententia statutae. What these second-century honorific statues of magistrates were like we do not know for certain, since none of them has survived. It would, however, be a fairly safe conjecture that they were the work, not of Romans or Italians, but of immigrant Hellenistic artists. We have no knowledge of any school of specifically Roman portrait-sculptors of this period; while from Greek lands, and particularly from Delos, comes abundant evidence that Greek portraitists, natives of Athens and of other east-Mediterranean centres, were carving portrait-statues of Roman officials and of other contemporary individuals precisely at this time. Some of these statues carried on the ‘baroque’ tradition of the idealized, heroized, or heaven-inspired Hellenistic ruler-portrait that began with Alexander's likenesses. Others, on the other hand, exemplify a new and highly realistic, one might almost say prosaic, development in Hellenistic iconography.

When Caesar was born, probably in 100 b.c., it is doubtful whether anyone at Rome would have expected a son of this secondary branch of the patrician Iulii Caesares to rise to great eminence in the state. The family, to be sure, was very old; it was said to have come to Rome from Alba Longa when King Tullus Hostilius destroyed the city, and the Iulii kept the tradition alive by maintaining associations with Alba and the Alban gods. But, in spite of the family's antiquity, the nobility of the Iulii, to paraphrase Cicero on another patrician, was better known to men of letters and to historians than it was to the voters. It was not even very well known to men of letters and historians, for the ten or eleven lulii who reached high office in the fifth and fourth centuries hardly average a line apiece in the six books that Livy devotes to their period—books crowded with vivid stories of patrician families like the Fabii, the Manlii, and the Valerii.

MichaelVentris died at the age of 34 last September in a motor accident. His discovery that the Linear B texts of Knossos, Pylos, Mycenae, and other sites were Greek ranks as one of the most brilliant achievements of scholarship, and has been internationally acclaimed a feat of the same order as that of Champollion in deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphs. The brilliance of this discovery is matched by its importance; it will take years to work out the consequences of the new knowledge, which proves that Mycenaean civilization was Greek-speaking, gives us texts contemporary and comparable with texts from the adjoining civilizations of Egypt and the Near East, and shows us the state of the Greek language half a millennium before our earliest Greek literature.

JuliusCaesar wrote seven books (a book to every year) on his campaigns in Gaul from 58 to 52 b.c., and three books (the first two describing the events of 49, the third those of 48) on his campaigns against Pompey and the Republican government in the civil war. A. Hirtius, who had perhaps been his secretary in Gaul, wrote Book viii of the B.G.—presumably in the latter part of 44—to describe Caesar's doings in 51 and 50, to link the two parts of Caesar's work together. This we know from Hirtius' own evidence, from the modest little introduction to his book. Who wrote the surviving accounts of Caesar's campaigns from 47 to 45 (the Bellum Alexandrinum, Bellum Africum, and Bellum Hispaniense), we do not know at all.

It is a poor age which does not throw up a giant. Whether he responds to a crisis or whether he creates his own opportunity, rising unbidden to tyranny, the genius dominates the contemporary scene. His achievements linger with posterity. Yet without that character which can attract loyalty and absolute devotion, without that personal magnetism which can turn dependable associates into fanatical adherents and servants into slaves, no run of successes can lift a man out of the rut of leadership into that position from which he bestraddles his contemporaries like a Colossus.

So much is written nowadays about the propagandist element in Caesar's Commentaries, and his supposed misrepresentation of his own actions, that it is almost forgotten that he provides the only contemporary narrative of a major Roman imperialist war, and that by its principal agent. The obscure record of the wars of Augustus has been subjected to a severe scrutiny, and the most diverse and recondite theories propounded about his purposes. But this long and detailed account of the greatest single extension of the Roman Empire has hardly been examined seriously for the things that its author was not concerned to conceal—the springs and purposes and means of that new form of imperialism that under Pompey, Caesar, and Augustus converted the Roman dominion from a suzerainty over a maritime fringe of Mediterranean provinces into a solid and broad-based continental empire. Caesar is most valuable in his admissions, for he admits such actions,; methods, and objectives as were commonly approved by the opinion of the governing class, whether political friends or enemies.

The victories of Pharsalus, Thapsus, and Munda had left Caesar in a position of undisputed authority and, as the year 44 opened, the question in Roman minds must have been how Caesar intended to consolidate and perpetuate his position. His assassination on the Ides of March left his contemporaries with little indication of what political solution Caesar had devised, and left to subsequent historians of the period the intriguing problem of deducing from such evidence as the last few months of Caesar's life provide what his political intentions had been. The initial difficulty of this problem is to free one's mind from the simplifications and, indeed, distortions with which subsequent political thought has reported the critical events of Caesar's last months; for in most of western civilization, particularly the English-speaking portion, the popular impression of Caesar as a tyrant and the conspirators as democrats is almost ineradicable, thanks to the dramatic story of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

The conspiracy which so tragically and so dramatically ended Caesar's life on the Ides of March, 44 b.c., is one of the best-known episodes of Roman history; for it has been given its tragic and dramatic setting by Shakespeare himself, who saw so clearly its tragic quality. Yet as we look back over two thousand years upon this incident, pregnant with fate, as it was, for Rome's and the western world's future, we tend naturally, I think, to regard with something of contempt the conspirators, many of them Caesar's friends, who could thus dare to dishonour friendship with their great friend's blood, and cloak envy and selfishness with hypocrisy's specious covering. Yet it must be remembered that sixty men, no less, were joined in this conspiracy; we cannot lightly condemn all of them for hypocrisy and spite; and even if our final verdict should be unfavourable, it is wrong to pass it without attempting to penetrate to some degree into the minds and motives of these men, to try to understand why they could, and thought they should, commit a crime so seemingly damnable.

A Few decades afterwards Livy doubted whether Caesar's birth had been a blessing or a curse. That was an extreme doctrine: ‘Pompeianism’ like Livy's could be licensed under Augustus, but it was not orthodoxy; and to say that Caesar had been justly killed was a crime. Yet the one clear judgement on Caesar in the Aeneid is a rebuke, and in Horace there is virtual silence except in extolling Augustus the avenger. It was Ovid's clear language which was best fitted to sum up the Government's position:

neque enim de Caesaris actis ullum maius opus, nisi quod pater exstitit huius.

Tacitus, in a famous passage of the Annals,2 comments: ‘Older men who had leisure to compare the present with the past noted that Nero was the first of our rulers who had need of borrowed eloquence. The dictator Caesar could hold his own with orators of the first rank; and Augustus had a ready and fluent mode of speaking which well befitted his imperial position. Tiberius had a rare skill in weighing out his words; he could express his meaning forcibly or conceal it as he chose. Even with Gaius, the disorders of his mind never interfered with his powers of speech; and when Claudius delivered a prepared discourse, his style left nothing to be desired.’

Thucydides wrote his history after his return from exile in 404 b.c. (i. 22). It is not easy therefore to be sure to what extent his account of the great Sickness depends on notes made at the time, some twenty-five years before, and how much on memory—especially of his personal sufferings, from which it seems he recovered without any of the ‘signs’ which he implies ‘marked’ all survivors. He tells us that he has described only the general features of the Sickness (ii. 51), since the symptoms varied much from case to case; perhaps he realized how difficult it is for anyone, even an experienced physician, who has suffered from some severe and unusual illness (ii. 50) not to consider his own symptoms characteristic.